I’d already paced my room for an hour. I’d tried the locked door handle a hundred times. Now, I leaned back in the wooden desk chair, trying to distract myself by seeing how long I could balance on the back legs.
Just yesterday, everything was normal. The desire to rewind time felt overpowering. Just one day. That’s all I needed—to go backward twenty-four hours. I missed Beckett. He’d know what to say to reassure me right now—he was always full of calming words that worked on both humans and farm animals alike.
When the knock came on my door, the front legs of my chair slammed to the concrete, and I stood so fast that the chair clattered backward onto the floor.
I was to the door in a half-second, swinging it open. Of course now it’s unlocked. Jack stood there just outside the doorway, face stony, body entirely beat up. I looked over his shoulder, fleetingly thinking I’d seen Finn standing behind him. Nothing. My throat tightened.
My eyes lingered on his arm where a greenish-yellow bruise had formed on his skin. It looked slightly raised. I couldn’t bring myself to meet Jack’s gaze. I didn’t know what this meant—Jack coming here without Finn, without grabbing me by the wrist to run out of the building. I only knew it wasn’t good.
“Follow me,” Jack said, his voice barely audible.
I couldn’t swallow away the lump in my throat, couldn’t bring myself to speak. Something had gone very, very wrong.
“I’ll take your earbud,” he added. I pulled it out and laid it in his outstretched hand.
My body numb, I followed him down the hall. I hated myself for feeling the draw, the attraction to him even through the deadness inside me. I should be feeling anger toward him and nothing else. He lied to me. He said he would make it out with Finn. He told me everything was going to be okay. But nothing about this moment felt okay. And yet still, there was this other thing, a feeling that I wanted to claw out of myself so it wouldn’t stamp out the anger that should be burning inside of me.
It was late evening now, nearly ten o’clock, and the light from the hallway sconces had been lowered to a dull glow. Shadows lingered in the corners.
After a turn onto another hallway, I forced myself to form a few words. “Where are you taking me?”
“The west wing. Finn is there.”
We walked in silence until we arrived at what I assumed was the west wing. Jack led me through a metal door and into a small, empty lobby where he retrieved a tranquilizer gun from a locked closet. Across the lobby, we stepped through another door and into a concrete foyer. My breath sped up.
The stench of urine and feces hung in the air. Straight ahead, the foyer opened up to a hall of cells. At the end of the hall a bright red exit sign glowed directly above a door. On our left, three metal doors rested along the far wall.
Some internal dread kept me from going further. Fear of seeing Finn, fear of what they’d done to him. Something shrieked down the hall. Jack waited, saying nothing.
Finally, I stepped across the foyer without looking at Jack.
In the first cell on the left, a face peered out at me from behind cage bars, not human but not a wholly different creature, either. It stared out at me with big eyes, a larger-than-human head, and gray-greenish skin littered with tiny bumps. Wisps of hair sprouted from its scalp in sporadic tufts and hung limply, matted together in places. The bone structure of the face looked painfully distended; the cheekbones jutted out, jawbone enlarged, and the skin stretched taut across the bones.
When the creature saw me, it rose from squatting to standing, and stood at least a foot taller than my own height. I realized she was a girl.
I couldn’t look away from her eyes. They were too alive, too bright to be animal, yet too wild and empty for human. They were brown, like mine, but darker. She didn’t talk, but her eyes spoke to me. It was as if every fear, every hate, every emotion she couldn’t communicate with words tried to leap through her gaze.
“They’re recruits,” Jack said.
“What happened?” I breathed.
“An injection. My dad created it in an attempt to stimulate their reproductive organs. Actually, it’s supposed to stimulate the entire body to operate more effectively. But it doesn’t work, obviously.” Jack nodded to the first cage. “They’ve nicknamed them “modwrogs.” Modifieds gone wrong. I don’t know which guard came up with it.”
I waited for the modwrog girl to react—maybe shriek, something. But despite the vicious eyes, she seemed herself. Her physical control made me take a step forward, tilting my head to get a better look at her. I half-expected to hear her speak to me.
“Careful,” Jack said.
The girl’s eyes widened at my movement. She hissed, showing teeth gnawed down to stubs. She stretched her arm through the cell bars and swiped for me. Her knobby fingers clawed the air just in front of my face. Jack jerked me back so fast that we hit against the cell bars at the opposite side of the hall. I screamed, jumping for the center of the hall, half-expecting to be grabbed by another set of hands. But when I looked back, the modwrog in the cage huddled in the back corner of his cell. He actually looked afraid of us.
“That’s Cym. She’s the feisty one.” Jack nodded toward the first.
As if to prove it, the girl climbed up the cage bars, threw her head back, and released a high-pitched shriek. Her squeal was echoed by several others down the hall. She slid down the bars slowly, watching me.
“My dad still keeps them to study the results of the injection, trying to perfect the serum.” Jack’s voice seemed to catch. “None of them have lived longer than three months.”
A boy in the cell next to the girl slumped against the bars. He had blonde hair. Not Finn. The boy next to him yanked at his hair, most of which had already fallen out. It was long, dark and curly. My throat caught and I squinted to get a closer look at him. Not Finn.
Cell after cell, modwrogs jumped at me or hunkered away, or stared without moving at all. Scaly patches covered their greenish skin, tiny boils on some of the patches. Most of their upper backs rounded, hunching, almost like the weight of their bodies strained their spines. Their clothes were ripped and dirty, some barely hanging on their bodies anymore. Piles of feces and urine sat in corners, usually in the same spot.
“The rest of the recruits are told that their friends get sent off to ambassador stations, but really, they’re brought here to the west wing,” Jack said. “Like I said, the girl in the first cell is Cym. This is Hugh, Evie, Liz, Charles …” Jack named them all off. It wasn’t until he reached the end of the row that I realized I’d been waiting for Jack to say Finn’s name. Relief rolled through me as we walked back to the front of the hall.
But something was still off, and I willed my voice to ask the question I didn’t want to know the answer to. “Why are we here, Jack?”
Where is Finn? But I couldn’t say his name. Not directly. Not here, with all these recruits so far gone from the people they once were.
Jack wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He scratched above his eyebrow with his thumbnail and avoided my gaze. “That door. Up the stairwell.”
I walked across the foyer and pulled open the door, revealing a flight of concrete stairs. Jack didn’t move.
“Aren’t you coming?” I said.
“I’ll wait down here.”
My entire body froze. “Why?”
He didn’t respond.
I took the stairs two at a time and shoved through the door at the top. The large concrete room looked unused, dilapidated, and eerily quiet compared to downstairs. Two fluorescent lights hummed above.
On the left side of the room was a solitary door. To the right, a cage like those downstairs. From the corner of the cage, in the shadows, I heard a rustling noise. My heart beat hard in my chest. I forced myself forward. When I saw him, I knew.
Finn.
My heart stopped.
Dark, curly hair hung down by his ears, thick and full, unlike the others downstairs. His head had swelled. His profile showed di
stended features, jawbone protruding. The greenish skin looked like the others, although less advanced with bumps and boils. His arms rested unnaturally down by his sides, the loose brown clothing hanging over his body. He squatted, knees bent up to his sides, engrossed in picking up pieces of something and dropping them into a metal bowl.
I swallowed, blinking away tears. “Finn?”
Immediately, he wrapped his arms protectively around the bowl and snapped his head toward me. His arm swiped the ground, collecting as many tiny pieces as he could and drawing them toward himself.
“Finn,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from breaking. “It’s me, Sage. I know you’re in there. I’ve come to get you. We need to leave. I’m going to take you home. We’ll get you help. You’ll get better, I promise.”
Finn looked at me without a hint of recognition. His eyelids pulled too far back and exposed more of the white than normal, but it allowed me to see the worst thing of all: brown eyes, lost and empty.
I had to get to him. We had to get out of here. He needed help. He needed me to touch him and bring him back. He was losing the conscious part of himself, I could sense it, see it.
My eyes scanned the room, searching for a way to open his cage. A bright red button rested on the far wall. I pressed it, and Finn’s cage door slid open.
“Finn,” I said, moving toward the cage, holding up my hands. “It’s me, Sage. Your sister.”
Finn remained in the corner. He watched me approach, hugging his food bowl to his chest. I got to the doorway of his cell before he even made a sound. A small growl.
“Finn …” I said. “Let me help you …” I reached my arm out toward him.
Finn pulled his swollen lips back from his teeth and hissed. He hissed.
I took another step forward, unable to give in. I wouldn’t give up on him.
But now that I stood fully in his cage, his eyes flashed, violent and angry—unreachable. This was a bad idea.
Finn’s gaze locked on me while I backed away, one step at a time.
“Finn,” I said, still trying, “we’ve got to get out of here. Can you hear me in there? Please. We need to go. Finn, please. It’s me.” My hands raised involuntarily as I retreated.
Finn tossed back his head and let out a screech so high and long that I covered my ears, still backing away and making my way toward the button to close his cage. On my next step back, my feet caught. My hands braced my fall, and I watched in horror as Finn loped toward me.
21
JACK
I waited against the wall downstairs, arms crossed, ankles crossed, the toe of one boot planted into the ground. I could hear Sage whispering to Finn, and I tried to block out her words and give her privacy. I knew the next few minutes would be hell for her. I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t even look her in the eyes before she went upstairs.
“I’m just telling you,” C went on, “the whole thing is ridiculous. I don’t know how many times I have to say it dude, or what to say so that you’ll finally listen to me, but it’s stupid, okay? Killing yourself at the end of this is stupid, even if Cunningham does give us the code.” I could picture C crossing his arms and leaning back in his roller chair.
“Caesar,” I said, “look at what happened to her brother. Do you think anything about this makes me feel good? This is my fault, C. MY FAULT.”
C continued as if he hadn’t heard me at all. “And now you’ve got the girl involved, and it’s going to be like a rerun of Romeo and Juliet. You kill yourself, and she’ll wither inside, maybe kill herself. I’ll be left to clean up the trail of destruction you left behind. Just think about me for a minute, okay?”
“Stop whining,” I said. “You act like I asked for this. And I can promise you, she doesn’t like me.”
“You are such an a-hole. You’re my friend, okay? I have the right to say stuff. And dude, she likes you.”
“You didn’t see her face when she saw the modwrogs. And you can say the whole word. I’m a big boy. I don’t mind.”
“I saw her face,” Caesar replied. “She likes you. All girls like you.”
“She’ll hate me soon enough. Give it another thirty seconds.”
“Hey,” Caesar changed the subject, probably because he knew I was right. “Aren’t you worried about that injection your dad gave you? I was waiting for you to mutate before my eyes, you know.”
“The liquid floods the body like a bacteria,” I replied. “I’m impervious to stuff like that.” But in truth, I had thought about it and wondered what would happen after my dad injected me with that remaining serum. So far, nothing, besides the burning throb and the bruise that the needle left behind.
Caesar sighed. “How does it feel to dominate in every area of your life? I hope it feels good. You’re living it up while you can, right? Before you kill yourself?”
I snorted, knowing C was just trying to cheer me up after what had happened with Finn.
Then, an ear-piercing screech came from upstairs, followed by pounding footsteps that I knew weren’t Sage’s. My head shot up, eyes staring at the concrete ceiling, wishing I had x-ray vision. Without saying another word to C, I grabbed the tranquilizer gun where it leaned next to my feet against the wall and jerked open the stairwell door, sprinting up the stairs.
22
SAGE
Ten feet away, Finn leapt into the air.
Behind me, the stairwell door swung open and Jack’s body hit mine with such force that I slid across the concrete and crashed into the wall. Jack’s tranquilizer gun ricocheted off the wall next to me. Black and white specs speckled my vision.
Through the fuzziness, I saw Finn landing where I’d fallen a moment before. Jack rolled out of the way just in time, kicking Finn in the head as he slid out of reach.
“No!” I screamed.
Finn let out a deafening cry, swiping at his head, and then leapt toward Jack. My vision blurred almost completely as I tried to press onto my hands and knees.
Their fight moved across the concrete. I pressed to standing. Jack kicked Finn in the head again.
“Stop!” I shouted.
Finn’s movements were slower, but powerful. His fist connected with Jack’s ribs and sent him backward. Jack slammed into a wall. He groaned, rolling away just as Finn jumped.
Get the gun. Hugging the wall, I scrambled across the floor.
When I turned with the gun, Jack and Finn were near the cage. Jack swiped Finn’s feet out from underneath him, falling to the ground as he used his legs to do it.
“Hope, RUN!” Jack cried out. “Run!” From his position on the ground, he kicked Finn’s chest, pushing him back, further into the cage. He turned back to me, eyes urgent, like he hadn’t realized I was still in the room. Jack’s gaze locked with mine, as I stood, frozen by his words.
Hope.
Run.
Just like Mom had said right before they …. Mom’s bloody face flashed across my vision.
I was brought back to the room by Finn’s screech as he slammed his hand down on Jack’s leg. Bone snapped. Jack cried out, grabbing for his crumpled left leg. It was all he could do to roll out of the way before Finn lunged.
“Finn! No!” I ran close enough to get a sure shot. Finn saw me coming a second too late and I fired. He swiped at the dart in his back, unable to reach it. He rotated to face me, as if realizing the dart had come from the gun I held.
I stepped backwards as my brother staggered toward me.
“FINN! It’s me!” I yelled. He kept coming, the dart having no effect. “It’s me!”
“Shoot again!” Jack yelled.
I did. The dart hit Finn’s belly. He swiped it away but not soon enough.
Finn stumbled, I could see him losing consciousness. A few more steps and he dropped to his knees. He made a groggy reach for my body before he dropped to his belly, silent.
“Finn!” I ran forward and sunk to my knees. My body shook while I wiped the hair back from his face and rested my hand on his bac
k. His heart was still beating. He was still breathing.
My head snapped up.
Jack.
He leaned against a wall across the room, clutching his thigh. The lower part of his leg bent at an odd angle, blood oozed where bone had broken the skin. Red trickled from the gash on his cheekbone, partnered by a fresh wound on his forehead.
I knew I should help him, should go to him. He saved my life. And I don’t know if it was the shock of everything, but I found myself shouting at Jack, my hand still on Finn’s back.
“You could have killed him!”
Jack gripped his leg, jaw clenched. “He would have killed you.”
“Why did you let me come up here alone?”
Jack ripped off a piece of his shirt and wiped the blood around the wound. “I was giving you privacy. I didn’t expect you would open his cage. Sage, we can still do this, we can still get out of here—”
“Screw you, Jack! Stay away from us!” The anger, the pain of seeing Finn this way, it overpowered anything rational in my brain. I knew it was happening, but I didn’t care. It felt right. Somehow I was going to figure this out. A way to save Finn, a way to get out of here …
“Don’t you understand?” Jack squeezed his thigh. “If we don’t work together we’re all screwed! They take me away to fix up my leg. They send you back to your little room. You live for six more days, until my dad decides to inject you, just like he did your brother. The Corporation finds your dad while I’m stuck here trying to figure out a way to keep you alive. Vasterias gets the code, and it’s all over. Don’t you see that?”
Utter helplessness washed over my body. The events of the last day overpowered everything else. My hand moved to Finn’s head, cradling it. “If you’re on our side,” I whispered, “then why didn’t you help him? You said you would get to him in time. Why did you let them do this?”
It was the first time I’d seen pain—real pain—cross over Jack’s face.
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